My daughter lived in Syracuse, NY for awhile...they don't see the sun up there too often in winter! 'Course, I don't suppose you really need celestial nav on Lake Ontario, probably DR works well enough.
Thanks for your input. I do a fair amount of sailing too, but coastal, although that includes extended Bahamas cruises from FL. But you don't need celestial for that, the distances are small enought that dead reckoning works very well, though nowadays we've got GPS. I still do the DR plot anyway, nice to have a "second opinion."
I'm curious about your N Pacific crossings and type of boat, etc.?
I sailed on merchant ships for 30 years. Started out with celestial and finished up with a company which was used as pre-market testing for electronic navigation equipment.
Back to the sunstone, there is a compass called a Sky Compass which detects the location of the sun by polarization even if the sun is just below the horizon.
There is a sun compass which reads the suns location by shadow and is afixed to a compass.
There is another called the Astro Compass, similar to the Sun Compass but used for other celestial bodies.
All three are museum grade now. I never saw one, they were mainly for polar navigation.
My favorite form of navigation was radar & visual along
coastal waters. Radar was my forte.